David C Rambles

2D/2N weekend trip to Zurich

Just got back from a short weekend trip to Zurich with an colleague of mine. The flight to Zurich from Numberg is just too cheap to miss. At EUR120, its crazy to miss the opportunity!

So I packed my bags with just some simple clothing and my camera and took at 6.15pm flight on Friday evening after work. The flight’s pretty short. At just 35 minutes of actual flight time, I only had the opportunity to listen to a couple of tracks before arriving in the International City, Zurich, Swisszland.

Checked in at Hotel Allegra, which by the way is really cheap for the price at EUR40/night with free half-hourly shuttle service to the airport and to the hotel, and went out to check out the Zurich nightlife as well as grab dinner.

Unfortunately, we didn’t do our research properly and ended up at Khan’s a upscale and expensive indian cusine resturant. A meal would cost about 30-50CHF, or about 40-60$ SGD. Needless to say, I was pretty burned, but it was still alright.

Food in Zurich is generally pretty expensive, but not surprising as they are one of the countries with the highest standard of living in the world.

Some snipplets:
- Helvetica is THE font used in almost everything in Zurich. From Swiss Airline’s branding to street signs. Very impressed with the whole design-culture of the city. Its very trendy, liberal and modern.
- Europride ‘09 happened coincidently during this weekend. This was my first time attending a gay parade as well as a formal civil protest. It was pretty fun. I’m perfectly heterosexuality but I have no problems with people having different sexual orientations. Its their right, and I support their form of protest. Which by the way is very carnival-like and I’m glad that they are not afraid to show who they are and what they represent. I took quite abit of photos, but it will take sometime for me to upload them.

Visited:
- Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich a museum showcasing modern design
- Kunsthaus Zurich Museum a museum showcasing art history, with pieces from renown international and swiss artists like Picasso and Edvard Munch.
- Lots of sightseeing places, like the city gardens and churches

Ate at:
- Hiltl Restaurant
- Khan’s Indian Cuisine
- French, Swiss and Italian Cafes

Food is really bloody expensive.

Will upload photos as soon as possible.

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Thoughts on Immigration Culture

As I sit in this small but cosy thai diner, waiting for a freshly made homecooked chicken omlette with rice, with my eyes gazed across to the turkish kebab cafe across the street, I can’t help but admire at the strength of these immigrants to this country; Germany.

The amount of hardship they must have endured to get to where they are, to leave their culture, homeland and friends behind to start a new life in a foreign country with a foreign language, must be staggering.

Looking back, it is amazing to see how many people are willing to leave their homeland to give their lives a fresh start. Look at the number of chinese immigrants in european and american countries. Even considering how our forefathers from China have taken the bold step of boarding ships from their villages in southern china to reach the shores of Nanyang (Malaya).

What made them do so. What made them travel so far? At the risk of losing it all in a foreign country. How do they keep their culture intact.

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Article 9 - Clause 5 [Singapore Constitution)

(3) Where a person is arrested, he shall be informed as soon as may be of the grounds of his arrest and shall be allowed to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of his choice.

(4) Where a person is arrested and not released, he shall, without unreasonable delay, and in any case within 48 hours (excluding the time of any necessary journey), be produced before a Magistrate and shall not be further detained in custody without the Magistrate’s authority.

(5) Clauses (3) and (4) shall not apply to an enemy alien or to any person arrested for contempt of Parliament pursuant to a warrant issued under the hand of the Speaker.

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Nuremberg Day 5 - Zeppelinfeld & Laundry

Went down to the hotel bistro for breakfast today. It was my understanding during my check that my hotel package does not come with hotel breakfast but I was getting sick of eating kebabs for breakfast, so I decided to try the hotel breakfast even though I needed to pay.

The breakfast buffet was pretty good, lots of ham, cheese, bread and pastries and free flow of Kaffee. As I was leaving the bistro to make payment, the hotel reception informed me that my breakfast is actually covered and I do not need to pay a single cent.

Guess the hotel bistro is where I’ll be having my breakfast for the next 3 weeks.

Took a tram #9 down to Doku-Zentrum, or the Documentation Museum at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds. Spent over 2 hours with the audio guide (comes with the cheap admission fee of 2.5EUR - Now, according to the website its 5 EUR, no idea why they charged me half the price though) touring the premise, learning more about the rise of the NSDAP and Hitler.

Its quite heavy in content, lots of video, archival documents and exhibits all over the museum and by the time I got to the end of it after watching the atrocities committed by the Nazis, it started to get pretty depressing.

After the museum tour, I went walking around the entire ground, visitng the Zeppelinfeld where the famous Nuremberg rallies were conducted as well as the uncompleted Congress Hall that was supposed to be used for NSDAP meetings.

Next to all these historical buildings was a nice lake where lots of families hang out in the weekends (its a Sunday). The weather was surprisingly good and warm today. I actually had my first drop of perspiration after walking along the route.

After ending the tour, I headed back to the hotel to get my laundry for laundry washing at the nearby laundromat. Was initially pretty confused over how to use the machines, but luckily James went through with me the entire sequence during lunch a few days ago.

Its starting to rain now in Germany. I can hear thunderstorms. The first I’ve heard in Germany so far. Anyway, heading to sleep.

Ciao.

In a bid to keep as much information as possible, the content of this series will not be structured or edited and is meant to be a rough guide of the various happenings during the time. Entries may be edited to fix various spelling mistakes or to include new pictures.

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Nuremberg (Day 2) - Olaf.

Met James, Garrett and some ex-Novell employees and linux kernel developers in the evening to watch the latest Star Trek movie as well as to celebrate Olaf’s birthday.

Olaf used to work for SUSE and was one of the unfortunate few who lost his job at the recent Novell layoffs. A very friendly guy, he is now helping his girlfriend with her pHd dissertation while working from his home office (at least that’s what the other guys are saying).

We spent the evening after the movies having beer over at Cafe Barcelona and then went down to James’ place to catch up, grab more drinks and just relax.

After hanging out with them for half a day, its great to be able to hang out with fellow introverted geeks who love open source as well as share the same interests in tv shows like Big Bang Theory and movies. And these guys are in their 30s and 40s.

Its pretty refreshing to finally meet people who are not afraid to embrace their geekiness within, just just be themselves. I only wish that when I get older, I do not lose that free-spirit within, while climbing up the corporate ladder. Then again, is business really the career path for me?

In a bid to keep as much information as possible, the content of this series will not be structured or edited and is meant to be a rough guide of the various happenings during the time. Entries may be edited to fix various spelling mistakes or to include new pictures.

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Day 1: Nuremberg

Day 1 Log:

Arrived in Nuremberg in the morning. Was on a 13 hour flight to Paris’ Charles De Gauile Airport for a short connecting flight to Nuremberg. Was pretty amazed at the lack of custom checking at Nuremberg’s end.

Nuremberg’s airport was pretty small to my surprise. But taking the city size into consideration, it wasn’t quite surprising after all. Nuremberg has a population of half a million only. After landing at the airport on a small regional Air France plane (it only had probably 50 passengers and is pretty small; Sitting on the window seat, it feels as though I was on a private jet as the there are only 3 seats per each row, seperated by just 1 seat to the aisle), I had to take a shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal and quite surprisingly, by the time we reach, the luggages were already on the carosuel (sp!).

I took my luggage and was looking around for the immigration counter, which was not there. I just had to take my luggage and walk out of the arrival gate. Interesting stuff. The freedom to travel around the EU countries without hassle or getting your passport stamped is pretty sweet.

So after coming out of the gate, I met up with James, a fellow Singaporean who is currently employed with SuSE Linux after doing a similar internship stint with the company. I was introduced to the airport train service as well as the tram service to reach my hotel.

As the hotel hasn’t packed my room up yet, I left my luggage with the conceige (sp!) and followed James to the SUSE Office to meet the rest of the SUSEStudio team. Luckily, I managed to catch some sleep on the airplane so I didn’t really experience jet lag.

The SUSE Office is located in the quiet suburbs of Nuremberg, its just 4 blocks away from my hotel and its just a few blocks away from the Kaiserburg (link), one of the oldest castles in the area.

Novell seem to model the office after successful tech startup offices like Google, Twitter and other creative software companies. All employees were provided with free flow of drinks from sodas to espressos, there are many lounge areas in the office where employees can play abit of table tennis, pinball, PS3 or just sit down and chat. Employees are given the option of working at home, so if you have things to do at home you can either go to work late, or just stay at home and work from there.

Its also nice to meet my fellow teammates, who are individually skilled celebrities in the open-source world. Everyone was very welcoming. James and I went out for lunch at the nearby Thai food with another intern who’s from another department.

I also managed to meet Garrett, our American UI developer who is very skilled at what he does. We went out at night to the city square to a local german restaurant where we got to try various traditional german dishes as well as the famous german cellar (sp?) beer.

Day 1 ended pretty late, I got to see the various medevial and modern architecture of the city, from the castles to the ultra-modern apartments and it really opened up my eyes to the ingeniuity of german architecture and engineering.

Interesting Quirk: http://gmail.com doesn’t work in Germany due to a pending lawsuit regarding the domain. When accessing gmail, a message will prompt you to use the alternative URL http://mail.google.com to access the site.

In a bid to keep as much information as possible, the content of this series will not be structured or edited and is meant to be a rough guide of the various happenings during the time. Entries may be edited to fix various spelling mistakes or to include new pictures.

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Pre-trip uneasiness

In about 26 hours time, I’ll be on my way to Nuremberg, Germany for a one-month long overseas internship stint as a developer with Novell’s SUSEStudio team.

This is going to be the longest consecutive period of time that I’ll be away from home,  and it is surprisingly quite unsettling for me. One of my personal dream is to be able to travel around the world, see new cultures, new history, new stories and being away for one full month would sound like the exact itinerary that I’d like to have, but yet there’s a sense of uneasiness as I cannot bear to leave my family behind even for that one month.

Perhaps its just the feeling that I cannot be there to watch over them (just as much as they always watch over me). Or perhaps its the knowledge that I’m going to be stuck in a city for 30 days and probably won’t get to travel much (due to work).

Either way, there’s just something different about this trip that I just can’t explain …

I’ll try and do regular updates while I’m over there and friends and family can follow me on Twitter to get more regular updates on my whereabouts and my activities in Germany.

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Should Singapore Student Unions Take A Stand on the AWARE issue?

The recent second-by-second twitter coverage of the AWARE EGM has got me thinking.

Generally in democratic societies (especially in Asia), students play an active role in promoting civil society. All across the continent, we can find student unions actively penning down their views and opinions on social and governmental policies, sharing and engaging the general populace in the thought process of creating new ideas and solutions to problems. We see Hong Kong University’s Students Union, writing a statement condemning Jackie Chan, demanding justice to victims and unveiling the truth behind the Japanese atrocities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Students Union and HKUSU condemning the Tiananmen Incident etc.

Why do we not see this level of participation in our local tertiary institutions (polytechnics and universities)?

In Singapore, our unions are generally very quiet, perhaps due to the depoliticalization of the student movement since protests are illegal, and any assembly of more than 5 people can be considered as an unlawful assembly.

But should this stop our student unions from taking a stand? After all, our counterparts in China, didn’t stop their protests despite knowing that they may face death by the government of China. Now surely, writing a piece on their stand on homosexuality, secularism and even religion shouldn’t be too hard should it?

Perhaps we should start thinking, is now the right time for student unions in Singapore to start getting involved? Our students have already started to organize by themselves and managed to make some headway, shouldn’t the union, with the support of its constituents, start to get out of the comfort zone too?

Take a stand, talk to your student union representatives. Ask them what do they think of this issue. If you’re no longer in school, talk to your grassroot leaders, MPs and your representatives. Lets engage.

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I’m back!

I’m back online, after migrating my various sites onto a brand new server which is just a subnet away from the previous one.

Migration to a Cpanel-based server from Directadmin is yucky, but many shoutouts to my friend over at Jweeb.com for graciously agreeing to host my sites.

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Smartphone, the $3,350 Sectera Edge [The Government]

Video of the NSA-approved PDA that President Obama and his staffs maybe using.

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